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Someone said the most ridiculous thing to me the other day. While expounding the virtues of her infrared healing mat, she said that if she lays down on it while the setting is on high, she get an aerobic workout.

“Um, pardon me?” I said, snapping back into a semblance of attention after drifting.

“Really! Your heart rate goes up and is elevated the whole time, and you sweat. It’s an aerobic workout!”

Shaking my head because I can barely believe this conversation is happening, I say, “and what about load on your muscles? What about moving your body?”

“Oh yes,” she flicks away the idea like a pesky fly. “I guess you still have to do some weight bearing exercise.”

I was left dumbfounded, but later realized that this was just an example of an extreme type of rationalization. The “I don’t have to exercise because if I lay on a hot mat for an hour it’s the same as exercise” one is new to me, but is all part of the same category of “I lie to myself so I don’t have to ever be honest about what it takes to get/stay fit.”

I’m choosing to be honest. When I’m not exercising, I’m not exercising. There can’t be any deception or I’ll never get off my ass and move my body. The rationalizations just make it so I get so far from fit that the struggle home to fitness is so overwhelmingly huge that it almost feels not worth it. Stay real. It will shake you out of your mind games faster and get you moving.

“I don’t want to feel bad about myself”. I’ve heard this argument a lot over the years, from some of the same people who have taken offense to our use of ‘Fattie” (That’s another post entirely & one I think we’ll all write together). Two months into our little blog I think it’s becoming clear that some ‘tough love’ is an essential part of the process in getting from Fattie to Former Fattie. Already I’ve been told I’m too ‘hardcore’ by a few readers and I’m too hardlined on some of my positions on fat loss. There’s a reason for my feelings on this subject and it comes from years of helping people lose the weight more than my own weight loss experience. Sometimes you just need someone to expect more from you than you do. Jennifer wrote an excellent post about it recently too, well worth a read!

I do understand the “I don’t want to feel bad about myself” argument in some respects. Bullying, Hazing and the levels of torment children are putting each other through are at levels I couldn’t even fathom in my childhood. One of the great projects to come out of the bullying problems is ‘It Gets Better’. When I was a kid, school was like ‘Bio-Dome’ where your whole life happened and you couldn’t imagine or fathom the world outside or even see how it was important compared to what you’re going through at that time. Like many adults you look back and see how small that world was and what you thought mattered then, really didn’t. It gets better because you eventually realize it wasn’t as important as you thought it was.

The flip side of awareness is hyper-sensitivity. Going back to hearing an ADULT say “I don’t want to feel bad about myself”. I take issue with that. I rarely if ever see fit people making fun of unhealthy people. I’ve given some thought to my own days of being fat. I did feel bad about myself pretty much every day. Yet I know now and knew then, the person making me feel bad about myself was me. Not fit people, not social norms, not fitness magazines or friends, co-workers or family. Just me.

The fat me lived with long hair, goatee and Metallica shirts. I was creating a wall between me and the world as best I could. Recently I was reminded about that feeling in the movie “Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead” (available on Netflix). In the film is an overweight truck driver, dressed like I did back in the day. A small child comes up to him and asks “Why are you so angry?” The trucker driver’s response took me back 20 years in a heartbeat.

“I’m not angry, I’m just in pain.”

What I really remember wasn’t anyone making me feel bad about killing myself day-by-day, instead it was the silence. No one said a peep to me. Maybe they didn’t want to hurt my feelings or my short-temper scared them off. When I started getting fit, I did it for me and depended on me to get there. The outside world wasn’t given a say. Oddly enough, once I lost the weight I had a lot of people tell me how worried they were about me when I was fat & self-destructive and I did get a lot of well-meaning pats on the back for turning things around. But it cost me friendships along the way, invites to parties, initially I became an outcast even within my small circle of friends. Ever since, I’ve always been appreciative of the kind words anyone has given me, yet I don’t give them too much power. At the end of the day I have to look in the mirror and see if I’m living up to who I think I can be. It’s not democratic, but I sleep really well for being that hard on me. It’s especially important now that I’m fit, for one absurd reason: I get more negativity thrown at me about my lifestyle than I ever have at any time in my life.

I get constant comments about how I eat, what’s good and bad for me “what I should do’ and I get CONSTANT unasked for diet and fitness advice. (Seriously a day I don’t have to talk about health & fitness outside of writing or training clients is a good day!) Now none of these people make me feel bad about myself, even when I get some mean-spirited stuff thrown at me (their issue, not mine). The worst part is this advice comes from people who have NO business dishing it out. And if I told you they made me feel bad about myself, you’d laugh your ass off. A big part of that is the percentage of fit ’40-somethings’ is a LOT smaller than the percentage of fit ’30-somethings’ a decade ago, I seem to stick out even more now. The BEST reward of my transformation is that I don’t really care much of people’s opinion of me. My true friends aren’t ‘yes people’ they will be both in my corner and also pull me aside when I’m not living up to who I want to be. I never sought to be accepted by anyone while I was doing this, I did it for me. My own standards come first and I work like hell to keep them pretty high. I have to look at myself in the mirror and see if I like who stares back, not just how he looks. It ain’t about abs & pecs folks.

Stephen King illustrates both sides of this argument in his book “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”. His first published novel ‘Carrie’ the title character came from compiling two girls he went to high-school with. One was named Dodi, her classmates nicknamed her ‘DooDoo”. Dodi wore the clothes they wore every day her family was poor. As the clothes got tattered and thinner the other girls become unrelenting; teasing became taunting, the girls didn’t just laugh at Dodi, they hated her too. Dodi was everything they were afraid of. In her sophomore year Dodi came back from Christmas vacation, dressed in new clothes. A new, cranberry dress and knee socks, a wool sweater, she even had a permanent. She was a girl transformed and you could see by her face she knew it. It didn’t mater, mere clothes changed nothing.

The teasing that day was worse than ever. Her classmates had no intention of letting her out of the box they put her in. She was punished for even trying to break free. Her smile faded, the light in her eyes dimmed and then out. By the end of the day she was the girl she was the day before Christmas vacation. She wore the new sweater and skirt the next day and the next day and the next. The new permanent wasn’t repeated and the new clothes took on a matted, dispirited look. But the teasing has dropped back to its pre-Christmas levels. Someone made a break for the fence and had to be knocked down, that was all. Once the attempt was foiled, the entire company of prisoners were accounted for so life could go back to normal.

By the time Stephen King published ‘Carrie’ Dodi had taken her own life. It was said her suicide was postpartum depression, but Mr. King suspected ‘high-school hangover’ may have had something to do with it.

What I’ve noticed is this. When we’re kids we are taunted and terrorized if we don’t live up to the social norms of our school peers. Being below this norm in any way leaves kids to open to bullying. As adults, it’s not until we poke our heads above the social norms and choose not to settle for the effortless ‘average’ that so many settle for, do we become targets to be shot at. You need to know this. As an adult it’s not until you attempt to change for the better will people try to make you feel bad about yourself. You’re doing what they know they should be doing and many will attack you doing it in their faces.

The good news is this: If you change your life by embracing your own health, by treating yourself well and making yourself physically & mentally stronger every day, those people who attempt to make you feel bad about yourself, will lose the power to do so.

That’s a strong statement from Mr. Smith and one I agree with wholeheartedly. Setting realistic goals goes hand in hand with the “Everything in moderation” statement. It’s just a dumb line that’s been mindlessly repeated without much thought to the implications. Realistic goals mean you don’t have to change much, it’s all about what you can fit in to your day, every little bit counts (unless all you do is a little bit), you don’t have to work too hard, you don’t have to be uncomfortable. The result? Sweet fuck-all happens.

When you try to make changes while staying in your comfort zone you fail!

I truly feel your utmost goal must be as UNrealistic as possible. Here’s why: Realistic goals are based in logic. Yet the things about you that truly make yourself YOU aren’t logical. It’s the things we’re passionate about. Things like dance, art, music & even sports are passions to people. There is no ‘why’ to your favorite song or piece of art; it just moves you. You can’t logically explain why it does, so you don’t try to – it’s enough just to feel that way. That combination of passion, emotional attachment and excitement is what most of us live for. That’s what really gets us out of bed every day.

So let’s go back to setting a realistic goal. Say you want to lose 5 pounds. Very realistic, but you have 50 pounds to lose. I have no idea how you or anyone else would even notice if you’ve lost 5 pounds, let alone get excited about it, yet totally logical and doable. I’s also the most common goal people fail at… the small ones. There’s no real reward for the goal, no passion or excitement and ZERO impact on your life. That’s why it usually fails or in the very least the 5 pounds comes right back and sometimes more. Without rewards a small goal can lead to a big failure over time.

I say if you have 50 pounds to lose, make 50 pounds your goal! You may have never done it before, it make no sense to even dream it but you know this is a goal that would change not only your life & lifestyle but it would change you. Once that goal is achieved the rewards are truly unlimited, some 17 years after losing 120 pounds myself, I still see how that goal continues to impact my life and my choices.

Here’s the other edge of that sword. How do you achieve an unrealistic goal? This is when you bring back the logic and planning. Now instead of making 5 pounds to lose a goal, it’s merely a step on your way to the unrealistic goal. It keeps you focused and gives you ‘wins’ along the way. I have my clients take monthly photos as progress reports, they again, see the wins even when they haven’t yet made it to the ‘after’ photo. Those ‘wins’ & progress photos make that unrealistic goal more realistic every month, your thought process changes and you go from hoping it’s working to knowing its working.

If you’ve noticed a common theme in these tips so far its this: Personal accountability is not optional, it’s essential. I beat this drum constantly because it’s the foundation to any change in your life. All my clients who failed in their goal skipped this, instead trying to rely on working out and eating better. I have people constantly telling me their goals and fitness plans, once people know what I do it’s just something people want to talk about. In those conversations I know within the first five minutes who will or won’t achieve their goals. (Closely correlated with the number of excuses I hear about why they haven’t reached their goal yet). Once you’ve become accountable to how you arrived at your starting line, you’re then empowered to make the changes to get to your finish line.

I’ve used this method many times in my life, starting with my first day or running in ’93 (Damn I’m getting old! If I weren’t so damned handsome, I’d be depressed!) I went on my first run that dark night, dressed in black (so no one would make fun of the fat guy running) I was so out of shape I got sick after one block and almost passed out right on top of it. Everything in my head told me to go home, I was too far gone. Then the ‘epiphany’ came. Run one more block tomorrow and keep doing that until you can run a marathon. The logical made it sound possible but the marathon ‘dream’ was the reason I went back out the next day. I needed the passion to execute the plan.Completely by accident, I set an unrealistic goal and a logical thought process to achieve it. It took three years but I ran the Seattle Marathon in November of ’96, 120 pounds lighter, from 297 to 180 pounds.

The rewards initially are obvious, I lost 120 pounds! But the real rewards kept appearing later on – I found purpose in my life, I learned to coach others turning the 120 pounds I lost to a far more impressive 4,000 pounds of fat lost collectively by my clients. I’ve met and become friends with so many incredible people as a result of that original goal. If I had set a ‘realistic’ goal and settled for that, none of this would have happened. So from the bottom of my heart and with love in that heart; FUCK ‘realistic’ goals! You’ll thank me later.

“If you do the things people will never do, you’ll have the things people will never have.” – Zig Ziglar

“Listen, here’s the thing… If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half-hour at the table, then you are the sucker.” Matt Damon (Rounders)

Of all the health trends I’ve seen over the years, the ‘cleansing detox’ may be actually be my absolute favorite trend of them all. Seriously! No other trend has been able to best manipulate EVERYTHING wrong with North America’s fading health. Instant gratification, fear-based decision-making, lack of knowledge, ‘all or nothing’ thinking, wish-fulfillment, self-destructive mindset and following a trend because its popular, one pill fixes everything mentality and picking ANYTHING but exercise – ta-da! You’re doing the cleanse.

I know full-well I’m picking (another) fight with a lot of you out there. The point of each ‘tip’ in this series is to grab your attention with an ‘F-Bombing’ headline, then provide a strong foundation of information to back it up. Therefore I get to challenge both you and I in the process. Think of it as turning F-Bombs into knowledge bombs. With that in mind, here’s a ‘Top Reasons to FUCK the ‘Cleansing Detox”

1. You begin a cleanse, because you’ve been ‘dirty’. Most everyone I’ve come across who do the cleanse, often do it before a vacation, wedding, summer or post-holiday. Basically when they’ve been eating & living shitty & they know it. There’s an old saying by Abraham Maslow; “If the only tool you have is a hammer, its tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Meaning if all you know is that you have toxins in the body, then the ONLY cure to rid yourself of all these poisons is a cleanse. Here’s my first question to you. If you’ve been accumulating all these poisons in your system over several years of poor healthy & poor diet, how on earth will taking a herb for 14 days ‘cure’ you? It feeds our ‘instant gratification’ mindset quite well, promising good ‘clean’ health in just two weeks. There’s too many ‘full of shit’ jokes running through my head right now to pick just one.

2. There’s a growing population of ‘Soap-Box Gurus” out there screaming the end of the world is coming! Yes there are indeed toxins out there, yes you need to be aware, NO you don’t go live in a bubble as a result! The cleanse for many is a fear-based choice. Fear that somehow the toxins are growing in their bodies and the industrial world is coming to get them! I agree whole-heartedly the closer we get to food in its original state and the farther we go from man-made food the better our health and our ability to fight off what ails us. There’s no better cleanse than real, natural food for 365 days a year.

I hope that bubble is recyclable and biodegradable!

3. There is no sustainability. The latest catch-phrase people keep spouting off is ‘lifestyle change’. The cleanse is no lifestyle change. It’s a Band-Aid to cover up your lifestyle up to this point. You’re going to stick to this cleanse for 14 days and ‘purify your system/soul/karma/chakra/new-age newness’. What happens on day 15? I’m dead serious. What do YOU do on day 15? If you’ve even made it to this point you most likely go right back to the lifestyle you needed to cleanse from!! Even worse you gorge yourself on that old lifestyle. Nutritionist Keith Klein calls it the ‘Theory of Food Deprivation” and it states that the longer you go without certain foods you more you’ll want it and the more of it you’ll want. This leads to an even worse state because most people’s metabolism has slowed down in those 14 days and all that food is about to be stored as fat! By the by, body fat is primarily your body’s garbage dump. Fat is excess calories tossed aside because you didn’t use them as energy.

4. Cleanses are self-destructive. The cleanse feeds into the ‘I’ve been bad and I need to punish myself for it’ mentality. No other method of ‘getting healthy’ makes you feel so un-well doing it. The lack of calories keeps you unfocused (to the point of not being able to drive), it makes you miserable and in turn you are miserable to be around. You pick the most plain boring foods so you are no way satisfied with your food and use it to further punish yourself. This is the biggest reason traditional diets fail too. Food is used as punishment. Just because you feel like crap doesn’t mean its working. To many ‘healthy’ food is assumed to be plain food. I use close to 50 different spices in my food over the course of a year and I would bet those spices combined have more anti-oxidant and free-radical destroying properties than ANY herbal cleanse on the market, not to mention I am constantly told by strangers how good my food smells when I’m eating my food somewhere public. Somewhere our society has associated feeling like shit as an essential part of ‘getting healthy’, I see people being lethargic, miserable, hating life & themselves and on the verge of tears trying better themselves. Is it any wonder so many fail?

5. You begin a cleanse with a body in a state of nutrient depletion. Poor diet and high-calorie/low nutrition food lead to little or no nutrient reserves in the body. Once the cleanse starts its usually associated with a very low-calorie diet and your body burns fat (which is where the toxins are stored!) as a result once the fat cells shrink the toxins are released into the blood stream and you have not nearly enough nutrient reserves in your body to ward them off. That herbal supplement isn’t going to do it. Hence, as you cleanse your body becomes MORE toxic! That’s why you feel like crap, it’s not because you’re making yourself well it’s because you’re making yourself sick!

6. It IS a diet!!!!! I have this fight with everyone I know who has done a cleanse. Everyone tried to tell me it’s not a diet- it’s about health. Then why do I throw up a little bit every time I hear somebody tell me that. I hate to break it to you but a cleanse is a low-calorie plan used to provoke the release of ‘toxins’ in the body (stored primarily in your body’s fat cells), taken with an herbal ‘cleansing product’ that is usually nothing more than a laxative! I hate to break it to you but when you’re severely restricting calories & taking laxatives (organic or not) you’re on a fucking diet! If you want to argue this point with me some more, please submit the comprehensive metabolic profile you must have had your doctor take before you started the cleanse and redo again afterwards to measure your body’s ability to cleanse yourself of these toxins. In the very least you would have known which toxins you needed to cleanse yourself of. How else would you have known your cleanse even worked otherwise?

7. Very few fit people do the cleanse. I’ve been a fitness & fat-loss coach for 15 years and I can tell you, amongst the fitness community, we shake our collective heads at the cleanse*. You know why? Because by going on the cleanse shows what cards you’re holding right away. You’re accepting you’re living a lifestyle that needs to be cleansed from. I don’t do the cleanse because I live a lifestyle I don’t need to cleanse from! I eat healthy, real, TASTY food and I exercise regularly. It’s a radical concept, no wonder its such a hard sell.

*There are the exception to this rule: The fitness expert that SELLS the cleanse.

I’m not going to start bashing on celebrity trainers. BUT it should be shown for the record, the trainers on ‘The Biggest Loser’ are NOT in charge of the contestants’ diets. Cheryl Forsberg is. Please be savvy enough to know that the ‘healthy’ products (like Subway sandwiches, etc..) are not used in conjucture with the Biggest Loser contestats while theyre on the ranch. Reality TV is big business and huge sums of money are offered to help sell products. Jillian Michaels is being sued for millions of dollars because she endorsed a dangerous cleansing product. (Read for yourself). It’s a sad reality that the business of the obesity epidemic depends on people failing. Does a company make more money when you try and fail ten diets or succeed at one? Even more sad is that the food companies, exercise gadget creators and celebrity endorsements work together on this front. It reminds me of another quote from the movie ‘Rounders’.

“We’re not playing together, but then again, we’re not playing against each other either. It’s like the nature channel; you don’t see piranhas eating each other do you?” Matt Damon (Rounders)

Lifestlye change is best defined this way: ” You’ve succeeded at a lifestyle change once you’ve reached a point where you never want to change back to your old ways.” – me.

There’s an old business adage that goes like this; “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” This is the the embodiment of goal setting, whether it be fat loss, money management, work performance, right down to the overall quality of your life.

This is the element of goal setting that took the longest for myself to figure out, but I can say I am a master at it now. I’m organized to a fault and almost always have been. I have a workout journal that goes back to 2001 (1997-2000 was water damaged along the way). I can tell you how many workouts, kettlebell sessions, 10 Km runs I’ve done, how well I’ve eaten, my weekly bodyfat percentage and how my life experiences has affected my health positively or negatively in the last 11 years. Its almost like a diary, I’ve always written down whats gone on in my life each month in my workout journal.

You may likely say “How anal, so OCD!” You’re probably right, but here’s the trick: I have never spent more than 30 seconds a day recording it. Those 30 seconds continually pay off for me. I know EXACTLY what the standard is to see improvements in my health, leanness and overall quality of life. I never have to guess and never have to make a resolution or resort to a fucking ‘cleanse’ (you bet thats gonna be on the top 10 list!). That workout journal is a map, I’m still working towards the destination. What I can tell you is at the age of 40 I’m physically stronger, leaner and more fit than in my 20’s and 30’s. Here’s another side-benefit, I’ve NEVER wished to be younger as a result. I truly believe I’m still getting better in every facet of my life and my best days are still ahead of me. I have the numbers to prove it.

Yet the map is useless with no destination in mind. So if you’ve set a ‘resolution’ for 2012, instead change it to a goal and add the following to it.

#1. WHY? – Why is this important to you? What are the rewards? Why is this worth the physical and mental discomfort you’re about to go through? (all change requires a period of discomfort) What are the consequences of NOT accomplishing the goal?

#2. HOW? – Create a map to get to your pre-destined goal. You’ll change it along the way, so pencils are better than pens here. BTW – write down the mistakes!!!! As far as knowledge and self-awareness mistakes are as valuble as gold.

#3. WHEN? – Like I said last week, take a look at your life and the 168 hours in each week (51 weeks left in 2012!). How much free time do you have and what part of each day can you commit to the goal? Can you find time to get to your workouts (including a commute)- lunch breaks? before or after work? weekends? When will you find the time to buy & cook the healthy food you plan to help you achieve the goal?

#4. WHERE? At the gym? train at home? at your workplace gym? outside?

Now that you know exactly what the goal is and you have the focus to go after that goal its time for step 5 (Steps 1-4 are here).

Step 5 – Clear the clutter! To make change easier we need to remove the obstacles from your life to prevent distractions & excuses. I’m a minimalist by nature, in fact my weekend project is selling a lot of old items on Ebay. I’ve lived in my current place for two years now. Anything I haven’t used or even looked at since moving in is being sold on Ebay. I find clutter distracting, a good cleanup/overhaul makes me feel organized and focused on the tasks ahead, instead of all the things “I should get around to” or haven’t done. Its a reduction of distractions both in my home and in my head.

“Sure I’m on the road to ruin, only gonna ruin it just a little bit. Well, that’s the trouble with self-improvement, only I know when it’s time to quit.” — David Lee Roth “A Little Luck”

Step 6 – Learn from your mistakes. If this is the same goal as your 2011 resolution then you must have a different method to achieve that goal. The mere fact that you needed to set the goal again should tell you the previous method sucked. Too many go out every January to achieve the same goal, the same way and getting the same (lack of) result. Don’t be one of those people! If you want change you must change first!

When people ask me about getting started, they always ask, ‘What motivated you? What was the inspiration to begin?” I don’t believe in inspiration, motivation or some grand epiphany to begin whats important to you. Epiphanies are an illusion and you’ve likely been waiting too long for yours to show up. I can honestly say in the beginning there really wasn’t any. One day I just came home from work and tried to go out for a run. Here’s what happened.

To be honest, I had no false hope of losing all that fat. I had never heard of anyone doing losing one hundred pounds before. Remember this was before reality shows, “Body-for-Life” , ‘The Biggest Loser” and even the Internet. I waited until dark, put on my dark shorts and an old hockey jersey then I went down my stairs, headed outside and turned for the back roads so no one could watch the fat guy trying to get back in shape. It lasted one block. My heart raced, my blood turned acidic and in less than 30 seconds my body was rejecting whatever I had eaten before I went out the door. I was locked into the hunched over position I was in, forced to look at my puke and spit on the ground before me. I knew it at that moment; I had let myself go too far. Everything in my head told me to go back on that couch with the potato chips hidden underneath and give up. Fortunately, my body was in no condition to move yet. I was now forced to take stock of what I had done to myself, no choice anymore. Something happened in those five minutes that changed everything. I thought up every excuse to quit, believing every one of them. Something in my head said “Go one more block tomorrow, and do the same every day, until you can run a marathon”. I’m not a religious man whatsoever & I don’t believe it was the voice of God. I also know it wasn’t my voice either. Over the years I’ve come to realize it was the first time I heard the voice of man I wanted to be actually speak on my behalf. I did go out and run two blocks the next day, and yeah it hurt even more.

I know what you’re thinking; “But you DID have an epiphany right there! When that voice spoke to you!!!” Its true, it was a significant moment in my life and I did indeed run that marathon 120 pounds lighter than I was that first day. here’s the part you may have skimmed over. I went for that run BEFORE I had the ‘grand epiphany’. Like I said last week about earning your moderation back, I believe the motivation/inspiration/epiphany/insight will not reveal itself until you begin without it.

We see inspiring quotes on Facebook every day, inspiring YouTube videos, motivational movies, people get inspired by ‘The Biggest Loser’ on a week basis! We are overwhelmed with inspiration every day! Inspiration is emotional Chinese food. We’ve overcome and fulfilled in the moment, but hungry for more 30 minutes later.

You may argue this (I’m used to it) yet only you can give inspiration substance. The hard question is this; What did these moments inpire you to do? If you sit weeping at the Biggest Loser every week instead of getting off your own ass (Seriously you would rather watch people being weighed on tv instead of burning your own fat, really???) If these inspiring moments did not wake you into action, then you’re not really inspired are you?

Stop waiting for some great insight some single quote or video that will give you that final piece of the puzzle to change your life. Motivation is not coming for you. Its waiting for you.

“First you jump off the cliff and you build your wings on the way down.” – Ray Bradbury